SoroushVahidi/scidocs huggingface dataset:
Role of mask pattern in intelligibility of ideal binary-masked noisy speech.
(2009)

Intelligibility of ideal binary masked noisy speech was measured on a group of normal hearing individuals across mixture signal to noise ratio (SNR) levels, masker types, and local criteria for forming the binary mask. The binary mask is computed from time-frequency decompositions of target and masker signals using two different schemes: an ideal binary mask computed by thresholding the local SNR within time-frequency units and a target binary mask computed by comparing the local target energy against the long-term average speech spectrum. By depicting intelligibility scores as a function of the difference between mixture SNR and local SNR threshold, alignment of the performance curves is obtained for a large range of mixture SNR levels. Large intelligibility benefits are obtained for both sparse and dense binary masks. When an ideal mask is dense with many ones, the effect of changing mixture SNR level while fixing the mask is significant, whereas for more sparse masks the effect is small or insignificant.
Are Computers Gender-Neutral ? Gender Stereotypic Responses to Computers
(2000)

This study tested whether computers embedded with the most minimal gender cues will evoke sex-based stereotypic responses. Using an experimental paradigm (N=40) that involved computers with voice output, the study tested three sex-based stereotypes under conditions in which all suggestions of gender were removed, with the sole exception of vocal cues. In all three cases, gender stereotypic responses were obtained. Because the experimental manipulation involved no deception regarding the source of the voices, this study presents evidence that the tendency to gender stereotype is extremely powerful, extending even to inanimate machines. Are computers gender-neutral?
Creating health typologies with random forest clustering
(2010)

In this paper, we describe the creation of a health-specific geodemographic classification system for the whole city of Birmingham UK. Compared to some existing open source and commercial systems, the proposed work has a couple of distinct advantages: (i) It is particularly designed for the public health domain by combining most reliable health data and other sources accounting for the main determinants of health. (ii) A novel random forest clustering algorithm is used for generating clusters and it has several obvious advantages over the commonly used k-means algorithm in practice. These resultant health typologies will help local authorities to understand and design customized health interventions for the population. A Birmingham map illustrating the distribution of all health typologies is produced.
Crowd disasters as systemic failures: analysis of the Love Parade disaster
(2012)

Each year, crowd disasters happen in different areas of the world. How and why do such disasters happen? Are the fatalities caused by relentless behavior of people or a psychological state of panic that makes the crowd ‘go mad’? Or are they a tragic consequence of a breakdown of coordination? These and other questions are addressed, based on a qualitative analysis of publicly available videos and materials, which document the planning and organization of the Love Parade in Duisburg, Germany, and the crowd disaster on July 24, 2010. Our analysis reveals a number of misunderstandings that have widely spread. We also provide a new perspective on concepts such as ‘intentional pushing’, ‘mass panic’, ‘stampede’, and ‘crowd crushes’. The focus of our analysis is on the contributing causal factors and their mutual interdependencies, not on legal issues or the judgment of personal or institutional responsibilities. Video recordings show that people stumbled and piled up due to a ‘domino effect’, resulting from a phenomenon called ‘crowd turbulence’ or ‘crowd quake’. Crowd quakes are a typical reason for crowd disasters, to be distinguished from crowd disasters resulting from ‘mass panic’ or ‘crowd crushes’. In Duisburg, crowd turbulence was the consequence of amplifying feedback and cascading effects, which are typical for systemic instabilities. Accordingly, things can go terribly wrong in spite of no bad intentions from anyone. Comparing the incident in Duisburg with others, we give recommendations to help prevent future crowd disasters. In particular, we introduce a new scale to assess the criticality of conditions in the crowd. This may allow preventative measures to be taken earlier on. Furthermore, we discuss the merits and limitations of citizen science for public investigation, considering that today, almost every event is recorded and reflected in the World Wide Web.
An Internet based wireless home automation system for multifunctional devices
(2005)

The aim of home automation is to control home devices from a central control point. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a low cost but yet flexible and secure Internet based home automation system. The communication between the devices is wireless. The protocol between the units in the design is enhanced to be suitable for most of the appliances. The system is designed to be low cost and flexible with the increasing variety of devices to be controlled.
Examining the Contribution of Information Technology Toward Productivity and Profitability in U . S . Retail Banking
(1996)

There has been much debate on whether or not the investment in Information Technology (IT) provides improvements in productivity and business efficiency. Several studies both at the industry-level and at the firm-level have contributed differing understandings of this phenomenon. Of late, however, firm-level studies, primarily in the manufacturing sector, have shown that there are significant positive contributions from IT investments toward productivity. This study examines the effect of IT investment on both productivity and profitability in the retail banking sector. Using data collected through a major study of retail banking institutions in the United States, this paper concludes that additional investment in IT capital may have no real benefits and may be more of a strategic necessity to stay even with the competition. However, the results indicate that there are substantially high returns to increase in investment in IT labor, and that retail banks need to shift their emphasis in IT investment from capital to labor. Prasad and Harker IT Impact in Retail Banking
Scalable Hashing-Based Network Discovery
(2017)

Discovering and analyzing networks from non-network data is a task with applications in fields as diverse as neuroscience, genomics, energy, economics, and more. In these domains, networks are often constructed out of multiple time series by computing measures of association or similarity between pairs of series. The nodes in a discovered graph correspond to time series, which are linked via edges weighted by the association scores of their endpoints. After graph construction, the network may be thresholded such that only the edges with stronger weights remain and the desired sparsity level is achieved. While this approach is feasible for small datasets, its quadratic time complexity does not scale as the individual time series length and the number of compared series increase. Thus, to avoid the costly step of building a fully-connected graph before sparsification, we propose a fast network discovery approach based on probabilistic hashing of randomly selected time series subsequences. Evaluation on real data shows that our methods construct graphs nearly 15 times as fast as baseline methods, while achieving both network structure and accuracy comparable to baselines in task-based evaluation.
Study of battery modeling using mathematical and circuit oriented approaches
(2011)

Energy storage improves the efficiency and reliability of the electric utility system. The most common device used for storing electrical energy is batteries. To investigate power converter-based charge and discharge control of a battery storage device, effective battery models are critically needed. This paper presents a comparison study of mathematical and circuit-oriented battery models with a focus on lead-acid batteries that are normally used for large power storage applications. The paper shows how mathematical and circuit-oriented battery models are developed to reflect typical battery electrochemical properties. The relation between mathematical and circuit-oriented battery models is analyzed in the paper. Comparison study is made to investigate the difference and complexity in parameter extraction using the two different modeling approaches. The paper shows that the fundamental battery electromechanical relationship is usually built into the battery mathematical model but is not directly available in the circuit-oriented model. In terms of the computational complexity, the circuit-oriented battery model requires much expensive computing resources. Performance study is conducted to evaluate various factors that may affect the behavior of the mathematical battery models.
Real-time flood monitoring and warning system
(2011)

Flooding is one of the major disasters occurring in various parts of the world. The system for real-time monitoring of water conditions: water level; flow; and precipitation level, was developed to be employed in monitoring flood in Nakhon Si Thammarat, a southern province in Thailand. The two main objectives of the developed system is to serve 1) as information channel for flooding between the involved authorities and experts to enhance their responsibilities and collaboration and 2) as a web based information source for the public, responding to their need for information on water condition and flooding. The developed system is composed of three major components: sensor network, processing/transmission unit, and database/ application server. These real-time data of water condition can be monitored remotely by utilizing wireless sensors network that utilizes the mobile General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) communication in order to transmit measured data to the application server. We implemented a so-called VirtualCOM, a middleware that enables application server to communicate with the remote sensors connected to a GPRS data unit (GDU). With VirtualCOM, a GDU behaves as if it is a cable directly connected the remote sensors to the application server. The application server is a web-based system implemented using PHP and JAVA as the web application and MySQL as its relational database. Users can view real-time water condition as well as the forecasting of the water condition directly from the web via web browser or via WAP. The developed system has demonstrated the applicability of today’s sensors in wirelessly monitor real-time water conditions.
Design of a Water Environment Monitoring System Based on Wireless Sensor Networks
(2009)

A water environmental monitoring system based on a wireless sensor network is proposed. It consists of three parts: data monitoring nodes, data base station and remote monitoring center. This system is suitable for the complex and large-scale water environment monitoring, such as for reservoirs, lakes, rivers, swamps, and shallow or deep groundwaters. This paper is devoted to the explanation and illustration for our new water environment monitoring system design. The system had successfully accomplished the online auto-monitoring of the water temperature and pH value environment of an artificial lake. The system's measurement capacity ranges from 0 to 80 °C for water temperature, with an accuracy of ±0.5 °C; from 0 to 14 on pH value, with an accuracy of ±0.05 pH units. Sensors applicable to different water quality scenarios should be installed at the nodes to meet the monitoring demands for a variety of water environments and to obtain different parameters. The monitoring system thus promises broad applicability prospects.
Routing in multi-radio, multi-hop wireless mesh networks
(2004)

We present a new metric for routing in multi-radio, multi-hop wireless networks. We focus on wireless networks with stationary nodes, such as community wireless networks.The goal of the metric is to choose a high-throughput path between a source and a destination. Our metric assigns weights to individual links based on the Expected Transmission Time (ETT) of a packet over the link. The ETT is a function of the loss rate and the bandwidth of the link. The individual link weights are combined into a path metric called Weighted Cumulative ETT (WCETT) that explicitly accounts for the interference among links that use the same channel. The WCETT metric is incorporated into a routing protocol that we call Multi-Radio Link-Quality Source Routing.We studied the performance of our metric by implementing it in a wireless testbed consisting of 23 nodes, each equipped with two 802.11 wireless cards. We find that in a multi-radio environment, our metric significantly outperforms previously-proposed routing metrics by making judicious use of the second radio.
A Review of Wireless Sensor Technologies and Applications in Agriculture and Food Industry: State of the Art and Current Trends
(2009)

The aim of the present paper is to review the technical and scientific state of the art of wireless sensor technologies and standards for wireless communications in the Agri-Food sector. These technologies are very promising in several fields such as environmental monitoring, precision agriculture, cold chain control or traceability. The paper focuses on WSN (Wireless Sensor Networks) and RFID (Radio Frequency Identification), presenting the different systems available, recent developments and examples of applications, including ZigBee based WSN and passive, semi-passive and active RFID. Future trends of wireless communications in agriculture and food industry are also discussed.
Attentive Fashion Grammar Network for Fashion Landmark Detection and Clothing Category Classification
(2018)

This paper proposes a knowledge-guided fashion network to solve the problem of visual fashion analysis, e.g., fashion landmark localization and clothing category classification. The suggested fashion model is leveraged with high-level human knowledge in this domain. We propose two important fashion grammars: (i) dependency grammar capturing kinematics-like relation, and (ii) symmetry grammar accounting for the bilateral symmetry of clothes. We introduce Bidirectional Convolutional Recurrent Neural Networks (BCRNNs) for efficiently approaching message passing over grammar topologies, and producing regularized landmark layouts. For enhancing clothing category classification, our fashion network is encoded with two novel attention mechanisms, i.e., landmark-aware attention and category-driven attention. The former enforces our network to focus on the functional parts of clothes, and learns domain-knowledge centered representations, leading to a supervised attention mechanism. The latter is goal-driven, which directly enhances task-related features and can be learned in an implicit, top-down manner. Experimental results on large-scale fashion datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our fashion grammar network.
An Ontology For Specifying Spatiotemporal Scopes in Life Cycle Assessment
(2015)

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) evaluates the environmental impact of a product through its entire life cycle, from material extraction to final disposal or recycling. The environmental impacts of an activity depend on both the activity’s direct emissions to the environment as well as indirect emissions caused by activities elsewhere in the supply chain. Both the impacts of direct emissions and the provisioning of supply chain inputs to an activity depend on the activity’s spatiotemporal scope. When accounting for spatiotemporal dynamics, LCA often faces significant data interoperability challenges. Ontologies and Semantic technologies can foster interoperability between diverse data sets from a variety of domains. Thus, this paper presents an ontology for modeling spatiotemporal scopes, i.e., the contexts in which impact estimates are valid. We discuss selected axioms and illustrate the use of the ontology by providing an example from LCA practice. The ontology enables practitioners to address key competency questions regarding the effect of spatiotemporal scopes on environmental impact estimation.
RASL: Robust Alignment by Sparse and Low-Rank Decomposition for Linearly Correlated Images
(2010)

This paper studies the problem of simultaneously aligning a batch of linearly correlated images despite gross corruption (such as occlusion). Our method seeks an optimal set of image domain transformations such that the matrix of transformed images can be decomposed as the sum of a sparse matrix of errors and a low-rank matrix of recovered aligned images. We reduce this extremely challenging optimization problem to a sequence of convex programs that minimize the sum of ℓ1-norm and nuclear norm of the two component matrices, which can be efficiently solved by scalable convex optimization techniques. We verify the efficacy of the proposed robust alignment algorithm with extensive experiments on both controlled and uncontrolled real data, demonstrating higher accuracy and efficiency than existing methods over a wide range of realistic misalignments and corruptions.
Semantic image retrieval system based on object relationships
(2013)

Semantic-based image retrieval has recently become popular as an avenue to improve retrieval accuracy. The “semantic gap” between the visual features and the high-level semantic features could be narrowed down by utilizing this kind of retrieval method. However, most of the current methods of semantic-based image retrieval utilize visual semantic features and do not consider spatial relationships. We build a system for content-based image retrieval from image collections on the web and tackle the challenges of distinguishing between images that contain similar objects, in order to capture the semantic meaning of a search query. In order to do so, we utilize a combination of segmentation into objects as well as the relationships of these objects with each other.
Development of HILS simulator for steering control in hot strip finishing mill
(2014)

In this paper, hardware-in-the loop-simulation(HILS) simulator for steering control is developed. The simulator describes lateral movement of the strip in hot strip finishing mill. The simulator include strip dynamics, mill model, mill motor and AGC controllers. The factors considered for strip dynamics are initial off-center and wedge difference. The wedge is realized using the expansion of deformation process. To test validation of a simulator, PID controller is tested.
Critical period regulation.
(2004)

Neuronal circuits are shaped by experience during critical periods of early postnatal life. The ability to control the timing, duration, and closure of these heightened levels of brain plasticity has recently become experimentally accessible, especially in the developing visual system. This review summarizes our current understanding of known critical periods across several systems and species. It delineates a number of emerging principles: functional competition between inputs, role for electrical activity, structural consolidation, regulation by experience (not simply age), special role for inhibition in the CNS, potent influence of attention and motivation, unique timing and duration, as well as use of distinct molecular mechanisms across brain regions and the potential for reactivation in adulthood. A deeper understanding of critical periods will open new avenues to "nurture the brain"-from international efforts to link brain science and education to improving recovery from injury and devising new strategies for therapy and lifelong learning.
Towards a holistic analysis of mobile payments: A multiple perspectives approach
(2006)

As the mobile technologies and services are in constant evolution, many speculate on whether or not mobile payments will be a killer application for mobile commerce. To have a better understanding of the market, there is a need to analyze not only the technology but also the different actors that are involved. For this purpose, we propose to conduct two disruption analyses to draw the disruptiveness profile of mobile payment solutions compared to other payment instruments. Then, we try to discover what factors have hindered the technical and commercial development by using a DSS based on a multi-criteria decision making method called Electre I.
The Impact of Information Technology Investment Announcements on the Market Value of the Firm
(1993)

Determining whether investments in information technology (IT) have an impact on firm performance has been and continues to be a major problem for information systems researchers and practitioners. Financial theory suggests that managers should make investment'decisions that maximize the value of the firm. Using event-study methodology, we provide empirical evidence on the effect of announcements of IT investments on the market value of the firm for a sample of 97 IT investments from the finance and manufacturing industries from 1981 to 1988. Over the announcement period, we find no excess returns for either the full sample or for any one of the industry subsamples. However, cross-sectional analysis reveals that the market reacts differently to announcements of innovative IT investments than to foUowup, or noninnovative investments in IT. Innovative IT investments increase firm value, while noninnovative investments do not. Furthermore, the market's reaction to announcements of innovative and noninnovative IT investments is independent of industry classification. These results indicate that, on average, IT investments are zero net present value (NPV) investments; they are worth as much as they cost. Innovative IT investments, however, increase the value of the firm.
Fingerprint matching by thin-plate spline modelling of elastic deformations
(2003)

This paper presents a novel minutiae matching method that describes elastic distortions in 4ngerprints by means of a thin-plate spline model, which is estimated using a local and a global matching stage. After registration of the 4ngerprints according to the estimated model, the number of matching minutiae can be counted using very tight matching thresholds. For deformed 4ngerprints, the algorithm gives considerably higher matching scores compared to rigid matching algorithms, while only taking 100 ms on a 1 GHz P-III machine. Furthermore, it is shown that the observed deformations are di6erent from those described by theoretical models proposed in the literature. ? 2003 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
1 Mobile Landscapes : using location data from cellphones for urban analysis
(2005)

The technology for determining the geographic location of cell phones and other hand-held devices is becoming increasingly available. It is opening the way to a wide range of applications, collectively referred to as Location Based Services (LBS), that are primarily aimed at individual users. However, if deployed to retrieve aggregated data in cities, LBS could become a powerful tool for urban analysis. This paper aims to review and introduce the potential of this technology to the urban planning community. In addition, it presents the ‘Mobile Landscapes’ project: an application in the metropolitan area of Milan, Italy, based on the geographical mapping of cell phone usage at different times of the day. The results enable a graphic representation of the intensity of urban activities and their evolution through space and time. Finally, a number of future applications are discussed and their potential for urban studies and planning is assessed.